by Mary Free and Christa Watters, Extension Master Gardeners
This post introduces the new word(s) added to our Illustrated Glossary. You may recognize some words as common gardening or botanical terms—although commonly used words are not necessarily commonly understood or their usage commonly agreed to. Other words may be more obscure, found mostly in flora guides and research papers. In any case we hope you find them interesting and even helpful in your gardening endeavors.
Left to right: pinnately veined leaves of river birch, pinnately compound leaves of black locust, turning leaves of river birch and thornless honeylocust, pinnatifid fronds of sensitive fern, and tripinnate-pinnatifid fronds of bracken fern.
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This is the time of year when the changing leaves pique our interest. We may wander around our neighborhoods or wander far afield to admire the colorful foliage at its peak. We spend time raking and bagging leaves, chopping them up for the compost pile, or placing them in beds for use as mulch. Even if we just allow them to amass under trees and shrubs to protect beneficial insects over the winter, leaves still capture our attention.
If you pick up a leaf and look at it closely you’ll notice its veins follow a certain pattern. The arrangement of veins on a leaf is called venation, which is a starting point for many plant identification systems. One of the most common patterns of venation is pinnate. Click on the links to learn more about these simple leaves or their compound forms.